Bute, an hour and a half from Glasgow by car and boat, may not be blessed with palm-fringed beaches but is the perfect setting for this dark tale about the ties of family.
McBride's novel is a heartbreaking stream of consciousness not suited to a tropical climate. The Guardian review from 2013 starts with the warning that the book is not a "beach read", but there is a place for its grey overtones and insular protagonist among Bute's craggy rockpools and cross-looking clouds.
This is a book whose nameless central character exists in a claustrophobic world of religion tainted with superstition, with only her ailing older brother for support. Her desperate bids for independence and sexual liberation are curtailed by shame, a toxic mother and her brother's vulnerability.
She trawls Ireland's forgotten backwaters on a raw, bruising internal adventure. Taken advantage of by a manipulative uncle whose sexual abuse is mixed up with the language of love, she rebels from her straitjacket life by having anonymous sex with a series of uncaring men. Then she embarks on a bid for independence in the big city, but is forced to return to a family home where her brother lies dying.
McBride's syntax is a jumble, leaping from one thought to another, with full stops more concerned with the rhythm of consciousness than standard English. Full sentences borrowed from Catholic liturgy stand out like fully formed shells in the sand; their simplicity and duplicity exposed amid the chaos. The style of writing is demanding at first, but eventually coheres into a deep emotional connection with the book's main character.
There is beauty in this novel, much of which centres on the touching relation between brother and sister. There's the moment where the pair, still just children, conspire to make their depressed mother a meal and, later, the main character's optimistic attempts to redecorate a room for her dying brother. It's a complicated beauty though, imbued with fleeting moments of poetry.
The book's rough edges are mirrored by Bute's jagged coastline, and I finished it looking out to sea from a good friend's holiday home, while rain merged listlessly into the waves. This tale of sibling love, sexual violence, our debts to family and the hypocrisy of religion is a fractured scream from a disjointed mind.
To read this book on a beach in Malaga, a simple stretch of white sand, topped by blue sky, would be to miss the point. A book this complex, with a beauty entirely of its own making, needs a beach to match – the Isle of Bute supplies it.
